Monday, 23 June 2008

Iris

Today we responded to a post on freecycle offering a 'massive quantity of yellow iris'. They weren't joking! The iris had 'outgrown' their pond. Since their pond is 3 times the size of ours I find that amusing. Theirs was a brick built raised square with koi in and they considered a large quantity of plants to be spoiling the scene. We on the other hand are particularly pleased to have so much greenery for our pond (even if it did come with a large quantity of spiders).

To give an idea of scale the pot is about one square foot.

In Japanese the word for carp is koi. So when we refer to koi carp it is equivalent to saying 'carp carp'. That reminds me of a placemat we used to have that was titled 'lake windermere'. Is there a word for using 2 words in succession that mean the same thing?

Strictly speaking I think that it is a tautology because that is saying the same thing twice using different words. However if one baulked at that one could try 'pleonasm', which is using more words than necessary or redundancy of expression.